Joan Raiselis, Tarrytown: 'Knowing that anything has value is a good thing'

Oct. 18, 2013

When Joan Raiselis planted a garden at her home in Tarrytown, she planned it behind a very tall hedge. Back in the mid 1990s, nobody was growing food in the front yard.

“It was an odd thing in Tarrytown,” she says. “Except for the old Italian men with figs.”

Twenty years later, other aspects of Raiselis’ sustainable lifestyle — conserving, composting, sewing, buying well-made goods that will last a long time — are about as misunderstood as her gardening was back then.

“Certainly in the food world, you know the difference between local and not-local,” she says. “I think one of the problems with the thing that I’m trying to do is that you don’t taste it — you don’t feel it. It has to have some intellectual basis.”

She’s trying to solve the problem by establishing Sustainery, a nonprofit she’s incorporated. She’s close to moving into a building that will serve as a gathering place and classroom where people will be able to learn anything from how to mend clothes to how to make sustainable choices on their energy bills.

“It’s how we can be better consumers and make better choices about what we use, or how we use things,” she says.

For Raiselis, the lifestyle started early. Her parents were homesteaders. Still are. Just last month, her father, “a strapping 86-year-old with a trailer on his van,” picked up six cords of free firewood from people with downed trees. They split it all themselves.

Like many young adults, Raiselis chose an opposite path. She became an architect, living in Manhattan. But after her second child, she and her husband decided to move out of the city. And that’s when she started to make the same choices her parents had.

“I didn’t want to put (my children) in a situation where I had to question the toys they were using or the food they were eating,” she says. She planted that vegetable garden.

Today, Raiselis is conscious about how every choice she makes affects her children’s future, and she makes every effort to conserve every little part of the environment, whether water (she collects rainwater), energy (she dries her clothes on a line) or goods (she spins wool). And wouldn’t you know it, her children are following her lead. Her younger son, who is studying at Cornell University, knows how to sew, and repairs clothes for his classmates.

“There’s a whole generation of people who are saying, ‘I want to make things for myself,’ ” she says. “It gives you an awareness of how things are made, and once you make something, you’re very reluctant to just chuck it. You’re very involved in it. And that’s a very good thing to have in your hat, because it’s also in your heart. Knowing that anything has value is a good thing.”